[cifs-protocol] RE: erroneous references to little-endian

[Richard Guthrie]

Andrew,

Thanks for bringing the issue to our attention.  I will research this and get back to your shortly.


Richard Guthrie
Support Escalation Engineer 
Open Protocols Support Team
Tel: +1 (469) 775-7794
E-mail: rguthrie at microsoft.com 


-----Original Message-----
From: Obaid Farooqi 
Sent: Wednesday, April 15, 2009 11:05 AM
To: Andrew Bartlett
Cc: pfif at tridgell.net; cifs-protocol at samba.org
Subject: RE: erroneous references to little-endian

Hi Andrew:
Thank you for contacting Microsoft for question about MS-NRPC. We have started our investigation on this issue.
A member of our team will be in touch soon.

Regards,
Obaid Farooqi
Sr. SEE | Microsoft

-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Bartlett [mailto:abartlet at samba.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, April 15, 2009 7:13 AM
To: Interoperability Documentation Help
Cc: pfif at tridgell.net; cifs-protocol at samba.org
Subject: erroneous references to little-endian

Before many (but oddly, not all) of the impossible-to-parse bitfield diagrams in MS-NRPC is the statement:

> A set of bit flags in little-endian format ... A flag is TRUE (or set) 
> if its value is equal to 1. The value is constructed from zero or more bit flags from the following table.

(search for little-endian)

These refer to bitfields are transferred over DCE/RPC, and as such are in negotiated bit order, as chosen by the client and server.  Therefore the reference to their bit order should be removed.  (This is doubly confusing because the table itself is in bit-endian order. :-)

There are exceptions where the use is actually correct - the IP address and credentials calculations, or in conjunction with non-RPC structures, but the rest appear to be a copy-and-pasted template reproduced though the entire document.

Can you please review this (and other RPC protocols) to ensure that these references are corrected?

Thanks,

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org
Samba Developer, Red Hat Inc.                  http://redhat.com